THE NATION; The Complicated Power of the Vote to Nowhere

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 1, 2007

SO it's yes to timetables for Iraq, both the House and the Senate have now said. But don't schedule the welcome-home parades yet.

For a start, the two very different spending bills passed in the last 10 days have yet to be reconciled and President Bush has promised a veto, with a veto override quite unlikely.

But that isn't to say the votes were meaningless, judging from the last slow-motion collision of a wartime president and the antiwar voices in Congress.

Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president's options.

''Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,'' said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. ''And it's happening more quickly this time because Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam.''

Vietnam certainly cast a deep shadow over the recent debate, both for those who demanded a swift pullout from Iraq and those who warned against it.

''The Department of Defense kept assuring us that each new escalation in Vietnam would be the last,'' said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who served in Congress throughout that war. In last Tuesday's debate he said that Congress should not be fooled again. ''Echoes of that disaster are all around us today,'' the senator said. ''Iraq,'' he added, ''is George Bush's Vietnam.''

Representative John Boehner, the minority leader, drew a different lesson. ''Our enemies understand what happened in Vietnam,'' Mr. Boehner said. ''When this Congress voted to cut off funding, we left Vietnam. We left chaos and genocide in the streets of Vietnam because we pulled the troops out and didn't have the will to win.''

In the antiwar view, both conflicts began with a blank check from Congress: the October 2002 authorization for the use of force against Iraq had its unmistakable parallel in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964. In both cases, many lawmakers would come to regret their aye votes, accusing the president (whether Johnson or Bush) of skewing the intelligence to win support.

For Senator J. William Fulbright, President Johnson's fellow Southern Democrat and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the regret came swiftly. As early as 1966, after Mr. Johnson was well into the massive troop buildup that would top out with 545,000 Americans deployed, Mr. Fulbright wrote that far more senators would have opposed the Tonkin resolution had they known that the president would treat it ''as a sweeping Congressional endorsement for the conduct of a large-scale war in Asia.''

Mr. Fulbright held a hearing in February 1966 where his tough questions -- televised nationwide until White House pressure prompted CBS to drop the coverage -- first made public the private doubts of key members of Congress. ''What those hearings did was to begin to crystallize Congressional and public opinion against the war, even though Congress had no idea how to get out,'' said Robert K. Brigham, a Vassar historian and author of ''Is Iraq Another Vietnam?''

But only late in 1969, with Mr. Nixon in the White House, did Congress consider setting real limits to American military action. In the Senate, John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky Republican, and Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, proposed a ban on funding for American military action in Laos and Thailand, and the bill passed.

But when the senators proposed to extend the ban to Cambodia, President Nixon fought back, encouraging the American Legion to mount a campaign against it and advising Senate allies to accuse doves of ''knife-in-back disloyalty,'' according to the notes of his aide H. R. Haldeman.

By the time a watered-down version of the Cooper-Church Amendment became law in January 1971, antiwar demonstrations had swept the country, American troops had left Cambodia, and the impact was largely symbolic, said Fredrik Logevall, a Cornell history professor and the author of ''Choosing War,'' about America's entry into Vietnam.

Still, Mr. Logevall said, Cooper-Church was a ''watershed,'' as the first limits Congress imposed on the war. ''Nixon and his advisers did feel constrained by Congress,'' Mr. Logevall said, ''but in a political and not a legal sense.''

Nixon feared that if he did not move swiftly to withdraw, Congress would seize the initiative. An amendment offered by Senator Church and Senator Mark Hatfield, a moderate Republican from Oregon, to force a total withdrawal by the end of 1971 failed decisively -- but that was partly because Nixon was ahead of his own benchmarks in reducing troop levels.

The most significant legislation was really a legacy of the war, coming after the American withdrawal was completed in early 1973. The War Powers Act, a delayed response to the Tonkin resolution, required the president to consult with Congress about military action. A new amendment, sponsored by Mr. Church and Senator Clifford Case, Republican of New Jersey, prohibited spending in Southeast Asia for more American military action.

That prohibition, and Congressional cuts in aid for South Vietnam, ensured what some conservatives still consider an avoidable outcome: the rapid fall of South Vietnam to North Vietnamese Communists.

To persuade South Vietnam to go along with the 1973 Paris peace deal, the United States promised it would offer air support, replacement equipment and money, said Lewis Sorley, a retired Army officer who served in Vietnam and is now a biographer of military leaders from that era.

''We defaulted on those promises, and the instrument of the default was Congress,'' he said. At the end, he said, South Vietnamese soldiers ''were washing bandages and buying grenades on the black market.''

But most historians contend that the South Vietnamese collapse was inevitable, in part because Nixon had made his strategic opening to China a higher priority. They also suggest that even without the Church-Case ban on more military action, Congress, taking its cue from the public, would never have tolerated new air support.

One striking fact from the Vietnam history -- and a cautionary tale for Iraq today -- is how long it took to disengage. The pullout came fully seven years after the Fulbright hearings first highlighted skepticism about American goals and capabilities.

''Congress is an incremental institution,'' said Julian Zelizer of Boston University, who writes about the politics of national security. ''That's its flaw and its virtue.''

Mr. Brigham, of Vassar, said the slow pace illustrates ''an old adage, but a good one: It's a lot harder to get out of a war than to get into one.''

Correction: April 8, 2007, Sunday
An article last Sunday about Congressional actions intended to end the Vietnam War misidentified the Democratic senator who co-sponsored an unsuccessful amendment with Senator Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, that would have forced a withdrawal of all American troops by the end of 1971. He was George McGovern of South Dakota -- not Frank Church of Idaho, who was involved in other antiwar legislation.